Empowering girls to dream and speak their mind
Adolescent girls in Guinea Bissau are learning about their rights and changing their communities in the process
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She looked shy until she started talking. At 19 years old, Adja Camara stood up in front of her girlfriends during the encounter in the “Bantaba de Badjudas”, or Girls’ House in Creole, and started naming some of the topics the teenage and adolescent girls discuss when they are together. Adja lives in Padjama, a village of around 2,000 people in the eastern region of Gabu, in Guinea Bissau.
The presence of the visitors from UNICEF seemed to put her a little off guard, but not for long. From female genital mutilation, to forced marriage and menstrual hygiene, the young girl was displaying everything she has learned over the past few years thanks to the “Adolescent Girls Education, Empowerment, and Participation Project”. Sometimes she hid her smile behind her veil – especially when she was explaining how to calculate the menstrual cycle using rocks and sticks to count the days – but as she kept talking, she quickly regained confidence.
The Girls’ House is a small blue circular building with seats all around, with a plaque above the entrance saying “Bantaba de Badjudas – the strength of girls is in their intelligence”. It was built under UNICEF’s Adolescent Girls Education, Empowerment, and Participation Project, funded by the French National Committee for UNICEF. Inside, the girls, aged between 12 and 19 years old, meet weekly to learn about topics like sexual health and women's and children’s rights and discuss issues that concern them, like child marriage and child labor. But the girls also use this space to be away from grown-ups and to laugh, gossip about events in the village or discuss the latest trends on the internet.
This is a safe space and here the adolescent girls of Padjama are learning to develop self-esteem, to speak their minds, and to defend their rights.
Outside the Girls' House, Adja is talking with her friends, Fanta Djabulai, 19 years old, and Cadidja Djata, 20 years old. You can see they are close by the way they laugh and play with each other. These brave girls aren’t afraid of dreaming. Adja wants to be a medical doctor in the future and the other two girls want to be teachers.
Adja, Fanta, and Cadidja have been participating in these encounters with adolescents since its inception in 2019, when a local civil society organization, Accao Nacional para o Desenvolvimento Comunitario, or ANADEC, started implementing the project in the Gabu region. In the beginning, volunteers who came to the village held sessions with just a few girls. Today, they have more than 70 regular weekly participants.Working alongside adolescents and parents has led to remarkable changes in behavior. ANADEC volunteers, tirelessly advocating for children's rights, have played a pivotal role in this transformation. In Padjama, the absence of recent reports of female genital mutilation and child marriage stands as a testament to the progress achieved. This impact is particularly noteworthy given the staggering numbers of gender-based violence in this area.
Approximately 96% of women aged 15 to 49 in the Gabu region have undergone FGM – the highest rate in the country. Moreover, Gabu also bears the highest percentage of women married before the age of 18, reaching 49.2%, according to the Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys of 2018/2019.
The three adolescents are very secure when they say they don’t want to get married now, because “marriage is too much work”. “Before people had to get married very early, but now the parents ask the girls if they want to get married or not”, says Fanta. The girls plan to marry only when they are 30 years old, so they “can postpone it for a long time and then be able to still have children”, Adja adds, making the other two laugh. Before ANADEC's interventions, the three girls, like most children, didn't even know their own ages because they didn't have birth registrations.
The Adolescent Girls Education, Empowerment, and Participation project aims to provide adolescent girls with competencies and life skills, including access to learning opportunities and an enabling environment for their development and participation. Interventions include the creation of enabling learning conditions in schools for girls using the principles of child-friendly schools, access to quality learning opportunities (second chance) especially for out-of-school adolescent girls, life skills, leadership, and empowerment programmes, sports for development, adolescent girls’ participation, and prevention of child marriage through partnerships with the communities. The girls are learning about gender-based violence – including Female Genital Mutilation and child marriage - sexual and reproductive health, human rights, and gender equality. All this under the mantle of the importance of education and access to learning for every child, reaching the furthest behind first and leaving no one behind.
In its next phase, planned for 2024 and 2025, the project will focus on implementing an Accelerated Learning Programme (ALP), to give out-of-school children the opportunity to access quality learning and complete primary school. To achieve this, UNICEF is supporting the National Institute for Educational Development (INDE) in developing a new comprehensive school curriculum for the ALP. Through the accelerated learning programme, six years of the primary school curriculum are provided in a condensed time frame over three years. This new accelerated education program is being tailored specifically for teenagers who haven't had the opportunity to start school when they were 6 years old or could not, for various reasons, complete the final year of elementary school, the sixth grade, before they were 12 years old.
This is Adja’s case. The young woman only entered school when she was 14 and now, at the age of 19, she has only completed the third year of elementary school. Unfortunately, the school does not continue past grade 4 in the village of Padjama. Children beyond this grade must attend a neighboring school, 14 kilometers away, that provides grades 5 and 6. The Accelerated Learning Programme will give adolescents and youth like Adja the opportunity to finish their studies in their communities.
“Now the girls are all very well educated and polite”, says Fatumata Djau. The 65-year-old woman represents the group of mothers in the village of Cutame, also in the region of Gabu, and says she is satisfied with the work ANADEC has been doing.
Parents’ support is essential. The project recognizes the need for a foundational shift in behavior and actively invests in parental education to prevent intergenerational conflicts. This means ANADEC’s volunteers have regular conversations with community elders and traditional leaders, where they share what they are teaching to the adolescents and teenage girls. The objective is to equip parents with the tools to address teenage questions without judgment and to help them understand and protect children’s and girls' rights.
In Cutame, the teenagers decided to put on a play to beat bashfulness. Inside the village school, and in front of their parents, teachers, and community leaders, they performed a show about children's rights, to show what they have learned.
Uma Embalo, 16 years old, tells us the girls meet twice a week in the school of Cutame and she loves the conversations. She is now in 5th grade and wants to be a doctor in the future. She is happy her family is not forcing her to marry at an early age.
The significant increase in girls attending school is also a result of the behavioral change occurring in the two villages. Before the start of the activities, the Padjama school had around 150 students and most were boys. Now, they have more than 450, between boys and girls. In Cutame, the school has now mores students and even started giving classes at night to adult men and women.
With these community youth dialogues adolescents and teenage girls have room to grow and develop, without fear or shame. “I really like the talks”, says, Adja, while Fanta and Cadidja smile and agree.
